Game Change

by John Heilemann

  What effect the racially tinged theatrics of the past two weeks would have on the results was the looming question on primary day. There was little doubt that Obama would win, but how polarized would the outcome be? One late poll suggested the answer might be: very. It showed Obama ahead by just eight points and claiming a meager 10 percent of the white vote.

  Harpootlian thought such polls were hogwash. That Friday night, just hours before the voting got under way, he showed up at an Obama rally in Columbia, gazed out at the sea of white faces in the crowd, then went backstage and assured the candidate that he’d win at least 50 percent of the vote. Obama wrapped a bear hug around Bill Clinton’s tormentor, then laughed approvingly and marveled, “You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

  Harpootlian was right: the result the next day was what Axelrod described as “a good, old-fashioned butt-kicking.” Obama prevailed by a whopping margin of 55 to 27 percent, while claiming a quarter of the white vote. More stunning, he essentially tied Clinton among Caucasian men and captured more than half of white voters under thirty.

  Obama’s victory speech was at once uplifting and defiant. Like his riff at the Iowa J-J, it had the Clintons in its crosshairs but never mentioned the couple. “We’re up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House,” Obama said. “Against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents . . . the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea, even if it’s one you never agreed with. . . . Against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election.”

  The anti-Clinton thrust of Obama’s remarks gained even greater resonance as word trickled in about a parting shot taken by Bill earlier in the day. Standing with two African American members of Congress who were supporters of Hillary’s, he was asked by a reporter why two Clintons had been required to take on Obama in the primary.

  “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ‘84 and ‘88,” Clinton said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”

  When Obama heard Bill’s utterance, he said to Gibbs, “Now, why would he say that?”

  For many in the Democratic Party, the answer was all too clear. Clinton was comparing Obama to Jackson to diminish the former’s victory, and to accomplish the blackening that Obama’s advisers suspected was his objective all along. (The Jackson comparison circulated in Clintonworld the night before, in an email from Bill’s former White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, which prophesied, “After Feb 5, Obama may prove to be a lesser version of Jackson.”)

  In the days that followed, Bill Clinton would indulge in an orgy of rationalization over what he’d said. He would defend it as a mere historical observation. He would cite African Americans, including Jackson himself, who claimed they took no offense. He would blame the Obama campaign and the press for seizing on his comments to hobble him and Hillary.

  Whatever one made of the Jackson comment, there was no rationalizing away the effects of South Carolina. The black vote was permanently lost to Hillary; Obama now owned it, just as he’d predicted a year earlier he would. The Clinton brand had been badly tarnished. The Obama campaign’s goal of reviving memories of the Clinton soap opera had been achieved. In addition to her money troubles, her organizational dysfunction, and her strategic confusion, Hillary now had a Bill problem on her hands.

  For Obama, all of that would have been sufficient to summon his million-dollar smile. But there was more. For much of the Democratic Establishment, white and black, South Carolina was the moment when it became conceivable—safe, acceptable, even de rigueur—to come out against the Clintons publicly and throw in with the challenger.

  How true that was would become apparent just forty-eight hours later, when the most potent symbol of Establishment support would put his full weight behind Obama. Barack didn’t generally give a fig about endorsements. But the backing of Edward Moore Kennedy was an entirely different matter.

  Chapter Twelve

  Pulling Away and Falling Apart

  IN THE BIG-GAME HUNT for big-name endorsements, Ted Kennedy was the elephant that every Democrat yearned to bag. There was no potentate in the party, besides perhaps Al Gore, whose backing carried more emotional and electoral wallop. In the yearlong run-up to 2008, Kennedy had been courted avidly by Edwards, Obama, and Clinton. But there was no way he was endorsing anyone as long as Chris Dodd, one of his best friends, was still in the race. The question was what would happen after Dodd was out—and Teddy was in play.

  Kennedy had long-standing ties to both Clinton and Edwards, but from early on he was smitten with Obama. The youth, the vigor, the idealism, the appeal across generational and racial lines—it wasn’t just the fawning press corps that saw Obama as Kennedyesque. Teddy was also moved by the sentiments of the ladies in his life, who were unswayed by any gender-based allegiance to Hillary. His brother Bobby’s widow, Ethel, had publicly anointed Obama two years earlier, calling him “our next president.” Ted’s wife, Vicki, adored Obama, and so did his niece Caroline’s daughters, who raved about the passion that Obama’s candidacy was stirring among their teenage peers.

  Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg herself weighed an Obama endorsement through much of 2007. Famously reserved, Kennedy Schlossberg had never taken part in politics with great relish or involved herself (except in 1980, when Ted challenged Jimmy Carter) in an intraparty scrum. Caroline liked and admired Hillary; they moved in similar social circles in New York. But after furtively sizing up Obama—slipping into two of his events in Manhattan without attracting notice—and being encouraged by her kids, Kennedy Schlossberg was leaning in his direction.

  As Iowa drew near, many of Caroline’s New York pals were being enlisted to fly out and canvas there for Clinton. Hillaryland was under the impression that Caroline was willing to make the trip. But Caroline, in fact, was dreading a call from Hillary asking her to go. She would have found it impossible to refuse, and once she had campaigned for Clinton, siding with Obama would be off the table.

  Hillary, however, as was her wont, had one of her staffers phone Caroline rather than doing it herself. Caroline ducked the call (“I’m sorry, she’s not in right now,” said a voice that sounded awfully like hers to the ears of Clinton’s aide), and later told friends she was chagrined at being fobbed off on Hillary’s staff. But she was also relieved to be free to follow her heart. Once Iowa conferred credibility on Obama, Caroline informed him that she was in, and his campaign started scheming about when to unveil her endorsement for maximum impact.

  The Iowa results also induced Dodd’s departure from the race, and the Clintons reckoned they now had a shot at landing Teddy. Surely he knew that no one would fight harder than Hillary for his dream of universal health care. Kennedy had twice taken the Clintons sailing on his fifty-foot schooner across Nantucket Sound; surely those voyages on the Mya had cemented the dynastic bond.

  But as badly as Hillary bungled Caroline, Bill’s handling of Ted was even worse. The day after Iowa, he phoned Kennedy and pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

  Kennedy’s displeasure with the Clintons only grew through New Hampshire and Nevada; he believed they were playing a dangerous and divisive game with race. With each passing day, he was more inclined to follow Caroline into Obama’s arms. Beyond his status as a liberal legend, Teddy was a cagey operator. Working the phones, consulting his far-flung network of counselors, he discerned a path that could carry Obama to the nomination—and the role he could play in helping to propel him down it. Kennedy also appreciated Obama’s approach to seeking his endorsement. Obama asked for his support, then gave him space, having Daschle, to whom Kennedy was close, check in regul
arly but apply no pressure.

  Bill Clinton took the opposite tack: he got up in Ted’s grille. In a series of follow-up calls, Clinton went from arguing heatedly to pleading desperately with Kennedy. (At one point, Kennedy told a friend, Clinton went so far as to say, “I love you”—a declaration that Kennedy rendered mockingly in a Boston-Irish imitation of Clinton’s Arkansan twang.) When Ted indicated he was going with Obama, Clinton adopted a lawyer’s mien, quizzing Kennedy on his motives. “The only reason you’re endorsing him is because he’s black,” Clinton said accusingly. “Let’s just be clear.”

  The day after South Carolina, January 27, Caroline publicly cast her lot with Obama in a Sunday New York Times op-ed. The next morning, she stood onstage with her uncle and Obama at American University, in Washington, the site of one of JFK’s most famous speeches, as Teddy offered his own endorsement. But Kennedy did more than that. In his distinctive, ringing voice, he vivisected the Clintons and sanctified Obama as his brother’s rightful heir.

  “There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier,” Kennedy thundered. “He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed ‘someone with greater experience’ and added: ‘May I urge you to be patient.’ And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It’s time for a new generation of leadership.’ So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.”

  The overt passing of the Kennedy torch touched something in Obama. Gazing out at the crowd of euphoric college kids filling AU’s Bender Arena, overcome by what the media would describe as a “Camelot moment,” he found himself choked up. But gusts of sentiment rarely stayed with Obama long, and that day, his reaction shifted quickly from emotional to political. Riding high, Obama saw the perfect chance to lunge in for the kill.

  Let’s get Gore on the phone, he told his aides right after leaving the arena.

  It had been a year since Barack and Michelle trekked to Nashville for lunch with Al and Tipper. Obama had kept in regular touch with the former veep, soliciting his advice on policy, but also cajoling him for his support. When Gore came on the line, Obama once again made the request, attempting to use the leverage from the Kennedy coup to engineer a devastating elder-statesman double header.

  There was much Gore found attractive about Obama—from his stance on the war to the grassrootsy, Web-enabled nature of his campaign—and he could scarcely say the same for the Clintons. His relationship with Hillary had been strained and hostile since their White House years, when she and Gore were, in effect, co-vice presidents, competing for power and influence. (Gore felt he had less of both than Hillary; the Clintons neither disagreed with his analysis nor cared.) And while time might have quelled Al’s and Tipper’s resentments toward Bill over l’affaire Lewinsky, impeachment, and their fallout in the 2000 election, the Gores still looked askance at the Clinton marriage, seeing it as an inscrutable codependency that coughed up chaos and melodrama in equal proportion. The idea of a Hill-Bill restoration caused them both to blanch.

  Gore had reasons to hold his tongue, however, in the context of the campaign. His stature and status now were rooted in a realm beyond (and, to his mind, above) partisan politics. His backing of Howard Dean in 2004 had misfired embarrassingly. Most of all, Gore knew that if he came out for Obama, his endorsement wouldn’t be the story. The story would be his repudiation of the Clintons. If 2000 had taught Gore anything, it was that the press had an insatiable appetite for Clinton-Gore psychoanalysis—and Gore detested being put on the couch. His gut told him his endorsement might wind up boomeranging on Obama, diverting the spotlight away from the candidate and his vision for the future and training it on a sideshow from the past.

  Obama tried to persuade Gore, extolling his gravitas, telling him that the importance of his endorsement would transcend the media chatter, assuring him they would plow through it together. But Gore wouldn’t budge. He was prepared to enter the fray only if Obama was in real trouble—or if the Clintons went nuclear negative and he thought that his endorsement could end the war before serious damage was done.

  Yet in the wake of South Carolina and the Kennedy consecration, Gore didn’t see Obama as a man in need of help. He saw a candidate who’d managed to bundle together into one extended news cycle two of the biggest game changers of the race.

  A FEW BLOCKS DOWN Massachusetts Avenue from AU, Hillary was holding a meeting at Whitehaven with her advisers. Her bitterness over the bestowal of the Kennedy imprimatur on Obama was chilling and close to the surface. “There was nothing I could do about this,” she told her aides.” [The Kennedys] have always hated us, always resented me and Bill as new people who aren’t like them.”

  Hillary had another reason to be in a foul mood that Monday. The Clintons had just lent $5 million of their own money to her cash-starved operation to see it through Super Tuesday. It was her husband’s idea, and Hillary didn’t like it one bit. Her midwestern frugality made her a highly nervous Nellie about debt. But Bill kept insisting: Don’t worry. I’ll do more speeches; it’ll be fine. This campaign is a money pit, Hillary thought. Having started the shoveling, she wondered when—and if—it would ever end.

  That night, Clinton trooped up to Capitol Hill to attend Bush’s final State of the Union address. Hillary had a checkered history with SOTUs. One year, she’d been criticized for talking too much during the president’s speech; another, for rolling her eyes; still another, for chewing gum. Invariably, she found herself embroiled in some pseudo-scandal—and this year was no exception.

  As the chamber of the House of Representatives filled up, Obama and his new best friend from Massachusetts strutted in like a pair of cocks of the walk, slapping backs, shaking hands, reveling in the kudos of their colleagues. When Hillary headed their way, they watched her warily, eyebrows arched, whispering to one another. Then Clinton, resplendent in fire engine red and wearing a rictus grin, reached out to shake Kennedy’s hand—and Obama turned his back on her and began chatting with Claire McCaskill.

  “The snub” was what the tabloids dubbed it, though Obama denied it was any such thing; he was just answering a question from McCaskill, he said. But the truth was that the Obamans had snubbed Hillary well before the speech—by rejecting an invitation from the Clintonites for the candidates to sit together during the address. After the carnage in South Carolina, Hillary’s staff saw value in creating “a picture of unity,” as one of her aides put it on a conference call. The Obamans preferred the picture of Barack and Teddy joined at the hip.

  The Kennedy effect on Obama’s fortunes was hard to overstate. For superdelegates, Ted’s stamp of approval was at once a potent symbol and a permission slip. It dominated the news in the run-up to Super Tuesday—receiving a boost that weekend when Maria Shriver, another of Teddy’s nieces and the First Lady of California, climbed aboard the Obama bandwagon. On TV, on the Web, and in the papers, the story line was one that both elites and the rank and file understood in the same way: Obama was ascendant, the Clintons were in free fall, and a new Democratic order was aborning.

  Both campaigns revised their Super Tuesday delegate projections as the poll numbers shifted across the country, the Obamans ramping theirs up, the Clintonites tamping theirs down. Further adjustments were required when Edwards at last quit the race on January 30, done in by his third-place finish in South Carolina. Whom Edwards would endorse, and what he might extract, remained open questions. But what had been a de facto two-horse race since Iowa was now officially mano a womano. And with Obama’s momentum surging, it seemed possible that he might not only breach Hillary’s supposed firewall but reduce her candidacy to ashes.

  As the results rolled in the night of Super Tuesday, however, those expectations seemed to have been dashed. Hillary captured four of the five largest states in play: California, New Jersey, New York, and Massac
husetts (a victory made sweeter by Kennedy’s perfidy). And she was on track to carry the popular vote for the day. It appeared that the House of Clinton was still standing—indeed, that Hillary had won the night.

  OUT IN CHICAGO, David Plouffe pored over the returns into the wee hours. Plouffe was a man who found the kind of beauty and meaning in a spreadsheet that others saw in a Van Gogh—and what he divined from the numbers now was pulchritudinous in the extreme.

  Hillary might win the night’s popular vote, but Plouffe could tell that her advantage was infinitesimal (50.2 to 49.8 percent was the final score) and based on millions of early votes the Clintonites had banked before South Carolina and Kennedy changed the game. Obama was on course to claim more states than his rival—thirteen to her nine. And even more important, he was going to emerge with a handful more delegates than Hillary.

  Delegates had been Plouffe’s obsession from day one. His eyes were set firmly on the only number that mattered: 2,025. Starting in the fall of 2007, he and his national field director, John Carson, began deploying people and money to the seven Super Tuesday caucus states, believing they would be fertile ground for Obama—low-turnout affairs dominated by progressive activists and susceptible to grassroots force. Team Clinton, by contrast, with its depleted resources and Hillary-and-Bill-fueled aversion to caucuses after Iowa, devoted next to no assets to those states. Running essentially unopposed, Obama carried six of them by vast margins, which allowed him to rack up enough delegates to more than compensate for the ground he lost to Hillary in the large-state primaries.